The Stealing of America by the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your
freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” —Author Tom
Clancy

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations,
tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures,
foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant
bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate
partners is theft.
We’re operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin
Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the
poor, you’ve got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves
stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way,
the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American
Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of
endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.
What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can
arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about
it, you have no true rights. You’re nothing more than a serf or a slave.
In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from
surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and
zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and
red light cameras to Sting Ray guns, fusion centers, drones, black
boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and
abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—is little
more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering
as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank
accounts of corporations.
The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There’s
the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of
illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic
collapse, etc. However, these rationalizations are merely excuses for
the growth of a government behemoth, one which works hand in hand with
corporations to profit from a society kept under lockdown and in fear at
all times.
Indeed, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
the real motivating factor behind erecting a police state is not to
protect the people, but to further enrich the powerful. Consider the
following costly line items, all part of the government’s so-called
quest to keep us safe and fight terrorism while entrenching the police
state, enriching the elite, and further shredding our constitutional
rights:$4.2 billion for militarized police. Almost 13,000
agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participate in a
military “recycling” program which allows the Defense Department to
transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police. In 2012
alone, $546 million worth of military equipment was distributed to law
enforcement agencies throughout the country.$34 billion for police departments to add to their arsenals of weapons and equipment.
Since President Obama took office, police departments across the
country “have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000
ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and
night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and
aircraft.” While police departments like to frame the acquisition of
military surplus as a money-saving method, in a twisted sort of double
jeopardy, the taxpayer ends up footing a bigger bill. First, taxpayers
are forced to pay millions of dollars for equipment which the Defense
Department purchases from megacorporations only to abandon after a few
years. Then taxpayers find themselves footing the bill to maintain the
costly equipment once it has been acquired by the local police.$6 billion in assets seized by the federal government in one year alone. Relying
on the topsy-turvy legal theory that one’s property can not only be
guilty of a crime but is also guilty until proven innocent, government
agencies have eagerly cashed in on the civil asset forfeiture revenue
scheme, which allows police to seize private property they “suspect” may
be connected to criminal activity. Then whether or not any crime is
actually proven to have taken place, the cops keeps the citizen’s
property. Eighty percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge
against the property owner. Some states are actually considering
expanding the use of asset forfeiture laws to include petty
misdemeanors. This would mean that property could be seized in cases of
minor crimes such as harassment, possession of small amounts of
marijuana, and trespassing in a public park after dark.$11,000 per hour for a SWAT team raid on a government dissident.
The raid was carried out against Terry Porter, a Maryland resident who
runs a welding business, is married with three kids, is outspoken about
his views of the government, and has been labeled a prepper because he
has an underground bunker and food supplies in case things turn
apocalyptic. The raiding team included “150 Maryland State Police, FBI,
State Fire Marshal’s bomb squad and County SWAT teams, complete with two
police helicopters, two Bearcat ‘special response’ vehicles, mobile
command posts, snipers, police dogs, bomb disposal truck, bomb sniffing
robots and a huge excavator. They even brought in food trucks.”$3.8 billion requested by the Obama administration to send more
immigration judges to the southern border, build additional detention
camps and add border patrol agents. Border Patrol agents are
already allowed to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies,
and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. As one
journalist put it, “The surveillance apparatus is in your face. The
high-powered cameras are pointed at you; the drones are above you;
you’re stopped regularly at checkpoints and interrogated.” For example,
an American citizen entering the U.S. from Mexico was subjected to a
full-body cavity search in which she was subjected to a variety of
invasive procedures, including an observed bowel movement and a CT scan,
all because a drug dog jumped on her when she was going through border
security. Physicians found no drugs hidden in her body.$61 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, one of the most notoriously bloated government agencies ever created.
The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans
Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers and
sub-agencies—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”$80 billion spent on incarceration by the states and the federal government in 2010. While
providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million
Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, it’s a gold mine to
profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America and GEO
Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry. Thus, with
an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to
prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons
at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, the prisons
would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have to
maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. This has led to the
phenomenon of overcriminalization of everyday activities, in which
mundane activities such as growing vegetables in your yard or collecting
rainwater on your property are criminalized, resulting in jail
sentences for individuals who might otherwise have never seen the inside
of a jail cell.$6.4 billion a year for the Bureau of Prisons and$30,000 a year to house an inmate.
There are over 3,000 people in America serving life sentences for
non-violent crimes. These include theft of a jacket, siphoning gasoline
from a truck, stealing tools, and attempting to cash a stolen check.
Most of the non-violent offenses which triggered life sentences were
drug crimes involving trace amounts of heroin and cocaine. One person
imprisoned for life was merely a go-between for an undercover officer
buying ten dollars’ worth of marijuana. California has more money
devoted to its prison system than its system of education. State
spending on incarceration is the fastest growing budget item besides
Medicaid.93 cents an hour for forced, prison labor in service to
for-profit corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and
Victoria’s Secret. What this forced labor scheme has created,
indirectly or not, is a financial incentive for both the corporations
and government agencies to keep the prisons full to capacity. A good
portion of the 2 million prisoners in public facilities are forced to
work for corporations, making products on the cheap, undermining free
laborers, and increasing the bottom line for many of America’s most
popular brands. “Prison labor reportedly produces 100 percent of
military helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of
other equipment. Prison labor makes circuit boards for IBM, Texas
Instruments, and Dell. Many McDonald's uniforms are sewn by inmates.
Other corporations—Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, Boeing, Motorola,
Compaq, Revlon, and Kmart—also benefit from prison labor.”$2.6 million pocketed by Pennsylvania judges who were paid to jail youths and send them to private prison facilities.
The judges, paid off by the Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation,
which specializes in private prisons for juvenile offenders, had more
than 5,000 kids come through their courtrooms and sent many of them to
prison for petty crimes such as stealing DVDs from Wal-Mart and
trespassing in vacant buildings.$1.4 billion per year reportedly lost to truancy by California
school districts, which receive government funding based on student
attendance. The so-called “solution” to student absences from
school has proven to be a financial windfall for cash-strapped schools,
enabling them to rake in millions, fine parents up to $500 for each
unexcused absence, with the potential for jail time, and has given rise
to a whole new track in the criminal justice system devoted to creating
new revenue streams for communities. For example, Eileen DiNino, a woman
serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy violations,
died while in custody. She is one of hundreds of people jailed in
Pennsylvania over their inability to pay fines related to truancy, which
include a variety of arbitrary fees meant to rack up money for the
courts. For example, “[DiNino’s] bill included a laundry list of routine
fees: $8 for a “judicial computer project”; $60 for Berks constables;
$40 for “summary costs” for several court offices; and $10 for postage.”
So even if one is charged with a $20 fine, they may end up finding
themselves on the hook for $150 in court fees.$84.9 million collected in one year by the District of Columbia
as a result of tickets issued by speeding and traffic light cameras
stationed around the city. Multiply that income hundreds of
times over to account for the growing number of localities latching onto
these revenue-generating, photo-enforced camera schemes, and you’ll
understand why community governments and police agencies are lining up
in droves to install them, despite reports of wide scale corruption by
the companies operating the cameras. Although nine states have banned
the cameras, they’re in 24 states already and rising.$1.4 billion for fusion centers. These fusion centers,
which represent the combined surveillance and intelligence efforts of
federal, state and local law enforcement, have proven to be exercises in
incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate
intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on “flat-screen
televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.”
In sum, the American police state is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle,
meant to keep the property and the resources of the American people
flowing into corrupt government agencies and their corporate partners.
For those with any accounting ability, it’s clear that the total sum of
the expenses being charged to the American taxpayer’s account by the
government add up to only one thing: the loss of our freedoms. It’s time
to seriously consider a plan to begin de-funding this beast and keeping
our resources where they belong: in our communities, working for us.